Joji Oka plays a mobster and Kinuyo Tanaka his moll in the 1933 silent "Dragnet Girl," at Film Forum.

Now for some positive news about Japan. A three-week, 23-film festival featuring five divas from the “golden age” of Japanese cinema opens Friday at Film Forum.

And the actresses are: Kinuyo Tanaka (1909-1977), Isuzu Yamada (born in 1917 and still with us), Machiko Kyo (born in 1924), Setsuko Hara (born in 1920) and Hideko Takamine (who died in December at age 86).

You might not know the women’s names, but you’ll recognize many of the films in the series. Kyo, for instance, appears in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s “The Face of Another” (1960). It tells of a businessman (Tatsuya Nakadai) whose visage is horribly disfigured in an industrial accident. He allows a doctor to fit him with an artificial face that looks nothing like his real one. To test his anonymity, the victim seduces his own wife (Kyo), who doesn’t realize who her new lover is. Spooky.

Kyo also is found in Akira Kurosawa’s famed “Rashomon” (1950), playing the rape victim.

Takamine, billed when she was a child as Japan’s Shirley Temple, excels in Mikio Naruse’s “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs” (1960), portraying an aging geisha in Tokyo’s neon-lit Ginza district.

In Yasujiro Ozu’s 1933 silent “Dragnet Girl,” Tanaka is a typist who tries to reform her crooked boyfriend, and in Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho the Bailiff” (1954) she’s an aristocratic wife sold into prostitution by pirates.

One of the classics of Japanese cinema is Ozu’s influential “Tokyo Story” (1953) — often found on lists of the greatest movies of all time — in which an elderly provincial couple go to Tokyo to visit their grown children, with tragic results. Hara plays the couple’s widowed daughter-in-law.

The Forum is on Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue; filmforum.org.

* The 40th New Directors/New Films opened Wednesday night with a jammed party at the Museum of Modern Art, co-sponsor of the festival with the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (The meatballs were delicious!)

Among the films to be screened this week, before the fest closes next Sunday, is Li Hongqi’s “Winter Vacation” (2010), an ultraminimalist slice of life in a small Chinese town during the winter school break.

In the funniest scene, a teacher proceeds to instruct students until somebody tells him it isn’t his class. Sounds like something that could happen in NYC’s school system. Details: newdirectors.org